How to Compose Intimate Scenes

Hey, what's up, guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnston here for "Outdoor Photography Guide." And what I wanna talk about today is how to compose intimate details in outdoor photography. Intimate details can be one of the easiest ways to express yourself as an outdoor photographer, but it can also be one of the most difficult and one of the most intimidating ways to take a photograph. And that's because you get to a location, and it's easy to see the overall composition of a big place. And it's easy to be overwhelmed by that when you step into a place. But whittling down your composition to even the most minute details and plants and in grasses can be one of the most difficult things to do 'cause you completely ignore the grand landscape, and you focus on the intimate details. So how exactly do you go about composing one of these intimate detail scenes? So one of the things I like to do to whittle down my compositions is just to get the other out of the way, get the grand landscapes out of the way, and then focus on the smaller things going on once the light kind of dies down. So we have clear skies today, which is perfect for what I'm photographing here. These are lily pads over this pond, and it's a great way to pair up the lily pads into an intimate scene and create those details in nature. So when you go about this, I basically just walk around the entire pond. What do I see? What pairs and what shapes within the lily pads can look good to photograph? And that's kind of what I'm looking for here. I'm trying to pair together pairs and triplets, so twos and threes of these lily pads. And if other lily pads get in there too, that's fine. It's all about pairing the predominant shapes that are in the landscape. So when you see pairs, shapes, triplets, circular patterns, lines, go about trying to compose that shot. When you start to work with it, kinda tilt your camera. See which works better when you're handholding these shots. An angled shot might look good because you're just pointing down at very intimate scenes within the landscape. We're not really focused on getting our horizon line exactly level here. Hey, guys, the biggest thing I want you to take away from this is that intimate details can be fun and not intimidating. They can be a great way of expressing yourself as a photographer, and they can literally be anything in nature. It doesn't have to be a pond full of lily pads. It can be plants. It can be grasses. It can be rocks. It can be trees. It can be fall leaves. It can be spring leaves. It can be really anything you want it to be within nature. That's why when I get to a scene, I photograph the big first, and then as the morning or evening continues, I focus on the smaller things secondary and really work on whittling down my composition into very fine-tuned, intimate-detail outdoor photographs.